Autumn Wild

By Robin Stone

A personal geography through a West Quebec season
Canadian Nature Essays

• Language: English
• Publisher: Petra Books
• Release date: Dec 12, 2010
• ISBN: 9780968578483

Book preview

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Fall song

Lost apples

Cheeky thing

Leafbright

Catchers in the field

Thornbirds

The leaf that wasn`t

Touched by lightning

Survivor

Voices

Another Saturday night

Give and take

Blame it on Eve

Others

Little waters

Hope

Sixteen books

About the illustrations

Acknowledgements

Foreword

I HAPPENED TO BE RE-READING Jack London when Robin asked me to write a foreword to these gentle essays. Both are nature writers, yet when put side by side we can only be struck by their radical differences.

The more I considered their viewpoints, the more I was startled to find that their views are not exactly in conflict, but rather deal with nature on vastly different scales. This is an unsettling observation, in light of London's very harsh world view. How much more reassuring it would be to find Robin’s clear and calm portrayals the more accurate description of our world.

London’s red of tooth, claw, and fang perspective, on the surface, couldn’t be further from Robin’s benign explorations. As the weekly columns appeared in The West Quebec Post, readers described them as pleasant walks in nature, along a stream’s edge, or rambles through a field; they valued them for offering this breathing space amid the world’s ten-thousand-things, which fill the other pages in the Post.

I suppose if London had also been writing a column it would have been a frightening one for its arguments and implications, but perhaps a more dramatic fit for modern media. The difference is that while Robin writes about daily life in a marsh or forest canopy, London was writing not about daily life at all. His subject was cosmology, describing not the lives of wolves or desperate men, as he is still taken to have been doing, but using these beasts as metaphors for forces and powers within the universe.

Robin Stone, on the other hand, describes daily occurrences where the powers behind events are not the terrible ones; the subject is the power of cooperation, of life’s interconnectedness, and the tiny dramas of growth and decay. Robin's are the powers of rejuvenation, recreation, and reproduction — in short, the powers which move all of our planet’s inhabitants all of the time.

Robin refrains from London’s metaphysical grandstanding, yet deals with the most cosmic of forces in metaphors, a walk in the woods, looking under a rock, examining the condition of great trees. So, dear reader, take that walk with these interesting essays, study the macrocosm in the cattail and the swallow’s flight. Save London for another, stormier time.

Fred Ryan

publisher of The West Quebec Post

Introduction

SIXTEEN YEARS AGO, in autumn, I moved to the Outaouais. The region has been my home ever since.

Those sixteen years have been filled with watching and listening, settling and learning, being and becoming. It has been an important time for me, an enriching and transforming time, a period during which I developed a sense of personal geography.

My personal geography, I now realise, revolves around the space here in the backcountry where I live and spend most of my time. It includes wider circles of regular travel — areas which have become familiar to me. My personal geography also stretches back in time to places I have lived and passed through, places that have moved and inspired me, places that have influenced who I am today.

My personal geography is essentially the land — its physical features, its inhabitants, and its less tangible, yet compelling character — and my relationship with it, including the awareness and emotion, connection and community, memory and meaning I associate with places I have come to know and identify with. My personal geography is grounded in a rootedness, an awareness of regional place, a sense of home that embraces the wild communities I recognise and value more and more as time passes.

This book reflects that personal geography, that rootedness, that sense of home and wild community in autumn. I hope you will be able to identify with some, perhaps even much, of what is written in these pages, and find elsewhere passages that make you smile